Reader comments

How are you liking Tizen 3.0 on the Gear S3?

I'm enjoying it so far. I haven't noticed any irregular battery drain. Still early but it's a good sign. The features and additions are useful. Glad that the watch hasn't been forgotten with the Gear Sport out now.

I've also noticed higher than normal battery drain since the update. Another annoying thing is the screen when it turns on it seems to "flash" on at max brightness before going down to my desired brightness. This is most annoying in the middle of the night as it's very bright.

Patiently waiting for the update, I believe the update that launched yesterday was for the Bluetooth Variant, us that have the LTE model I'm guessing are waiting for the update to go through the carrier verification process 😔

Another temptation to try. I've been a solid Android Wear user for a few years now but I've always liked the slickness of Tizen. It just may be hard to give up Google Assistant, which as worked rather well on Android 2.0 for me.

You CAN'T swipe down to GO BACK anymore!!! That makes no sense. Does anyone know how to re-enable that functionality which broke/changed in the recent update. How can I go back without hitting the physical button?? That's got to be a mistake that now the only way to go back is to reach over and hit the back button. As someone who wears the watch on my right hand, it's already annoying enough that the buttons are on the "far side" but now this! Ugh. Someone please help!

So you always just hit the back button? Yes, you could always swipe down to go back. If you swiped from the very tip of the watch it brought down the quick settings menu as it does still. Hopefully there's a way to re-enable this.

If we could flip the watch like you can on the Apple Watch then the buttons would be on the side closest to your other hand. Most wear their watch on their right wrist, but many left handed people wear watches on their right wrist. It just doesn't make sense that they'd take that away, or not give users the option to either re-enable it, or, what they SHOULD do is have a simple setting for "Left Wrist" or "Right Wrist" like the apple watch does and then you can just flip the watch and all is well. The watch already rotates 90 degrees when you dock it, so it couldn't be too hard to go that last 90 degrees. Pretend your buttons are on the opposite side (facing your arm/bicep), now try reaching over and pressing the button every time. Annoying isn't it? Not impossible of course, but annoying and one UI feature Samsung should DEFINITELY steal from Apple.

Battery does drain faster but it's minor and I finish a full day including a 69 minute run with 30%+ battery.
The improvements are nice but my concern with tizen continues to be a lack of app support. I asked multi developers if they would add tizen support and every single one has said they have no plans to do so.
These are developers that support Android wear.
I feel like I'm back on WM10 where I have what feels like the best watch OS but with little app support does it matter?